Google Translation

As you may know, Google uses (used?) Systran for their translation software, as do quite a few other major players. Google has also been working on their own translation software. I won’t go into the details of that, but if you conduct translations on Google and Systran now, the results seem different.

So is Google testing out their own translation software without announcing it? When Google launches it officially, you can be sure that it’ll be a huge announcement. Anyone want to run some tests on different translators to uncover more information?

12 Responses to Google Translation

At the google infosession last week, one of the things they talked about was their translation software.. the guy there mentioned that they’ve been able to throw so much data at their software’s learning algorithm that it now beats out all other translation software. Apparently there’s some translation contest that’s held every year and they won in all the categories. So yeah, it might be that they now consider their translation software da bomb! and ready to be rolled out.

Google hired one of the most famous MT experts, Franz-Josef Och (he was at RWTH Aachen before). They are working on statistical machine translation SMT. One of Google’s strong point in it is that they have massive computer power. For SMT to work, you need a lot of parallel text (source and translation) to train the engine. Note that the NIST score probably favours SMT in comparison to rule based systems like Systran (RBMT).

A rather classical test of MT systems is double translation, e.g. english-german-back to english; with Google website this is very easy to implement, two-way translation is provided for all languages. In the following are results of copy-paste two-way translations from a sentence from the same page http://www.google.com/language_tools (only European languages were used) – can you tell what was the original sentence?

english-language1-english:
Adjust the homepage Google, the announcements and the keys to announcement in your preselected language over our preference side.

english-language2-english:
Rules the homepage of Google, the messages and the keys to exposure in your language selected via our page of preferences.

english-language3-english:
Fix the homepage of Google, the messages, and the bellboys to the exhibition in its language selected via our page of the preferences.

So – “Adjust the homepage Google, the messages and the bellboys to the exhibition in its language selected via our page of preferences”. Clear?